November 6, 2022 at 8:03AM
In reply to: @gerardkcohen on Twitter
Part of what made me finally give up on Twitter is this thread from Gerard K. Cohen.
I don’t know Gerard or any of the other former members of Twitter accessibility team. But I do know that they’ve done great work on a challenging platform and with a lot of eyes on them.
I don’t like the way Twitter functions to radicalize people. I don’t like the way it tolerates racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia. I don’t like that powerful people were permitted to use it to broadcast hate. I really don’t like that the new ownership seems eager to allow that kind of content.
But I also recognize that content moderation is hard to do at this scale, and people have different opinions. I can say “just ban all the Nazis” but I’m not the one who has to figure out how that works on a global policy level.
But eliminating the entire accessibility team is different.
Obviously one reason it hits hard is because this is my field, and it’s easy to see myself in the people who just lost their jobs.
But it’s also because eliminating that team is a statement about the new owner’s values. The whole point of a platform like Twitter is that anyone and everyone can log on and participate in uncountable conversations. With no accessibility team, you’re making a choice to exclude a lot of people from “anyone and everyone.”
Accessibility is about a baseline respect for the people you serve. For a company like Twitter, there’s no excuse that justifies not having an accessibility team. These are the kinds of core values that inform every other decision.
So that’s the last straw. Time to let go of Twitter, whose good mostly outweighed the bad for me. I don’t know what will replace it (or if anything should), but for now I’m here.